Bluesky is down — Live updates on the ongoing outage

The spike is spiking

While reports for Bluesky have risen and fallen all throughout the morning, it jumped to a much higher number at around 2,700 and then quickly dropped to 1,200. While it's lower than the peak, that's still a large number of reports and is definityely enough to think that something pretty serious is impacting Bluesky.

Bluesky acknowledges the outage

Bluesky was quick to acknowledge the issue on its status page, keeping its users up-to-date on what's happening with the popular social network.

Dropping like a stone

The reports are dropping fast on Downdetector, currently sitting around 450 as of this post.

Working fine for me

Bluesky is working well for me, so I'm not among the people still dealing with issues. But for those who are, hopefully the lower Downdetector report numbers means things are starting to come back to normal.

It seems to be just a couple of servers

According to the Bluesky status page, two servers are experiencing issues. It mentions that api.pop1.bsky.app and api.pop2.bsky.app are both down. "The response took so long that the connection timed out," reads the status page.

On the rise again...

And as quickly as the numbers went down, they started going up again on Downdetector. Presumably, the outage being limited to just a couple of servers means it's not hitting everyone, but as people are affected, they're logging into Downdetector to report that something isn't right.

This actually started hours ago

It's worth noting that while the biggest spike happened recently, this outage actually started more than 7 hours ago. It's an issue Bluesky has been working on for a long time, so hopefully, we're getting close to the end.

Outage won't quite end

Reports have yet to quite die down on the tracking site Down Detector. As of this posting, it's sitting at just 1,000.

However, the official status page still shows problems, but it hasn't been updated in a couple of hours.

Service status

According to the Bluesky status page, the two affected sections of the app are "api.pop1.bsky.app" and "api.pop2.bsky.app" both of which have been down for more than 11 hours.

It's not clear how much of the platform these two sections control. The status page shows percentages which seem to indicate that around half of the interactions are failing.

No changes

Update: We are investigating an incident with service in one of our regions status.bsky.app

— @status.bsky.app (@status.bsky.app.bsky.social) 2026-04-16T18:47:12.520Z

The status and reports haven't really changed.

The most recent update I was able to find actually via Bluesky said that the platform is investigating an incident in an unnamed region.

Fixes ere deployed more than 5 hours ago but it appears they haven't totally solved the issues.

What I'm seeing right now

I am able to access my Bluesky feeds and it seems to be loading alright. However, clicking into individual posts takes a bit to load.

You can see how it looks in the image above.

Is Claude to blame?

Bluesky is made with AI, the engineers and even some non-engineers use Claude code

— @jay.bsky.team (@jay.bsky.team.bsky.social) 2026-04-16T19:19:34.043Z

Over the last couple of weeks, Anthropic's Claude has been a rollercoaster ride that seems to go down multiple times day. It's gotten to the point that you can't even track an outage because it starts and stops so quick.

And then there's this post from Bluesky CIO Jay saying that the company uses AI and Claude.

I'm wondering if that may be why the the app is having issues today. But that is admittedly, idle speculation.

A brief spike but it settled

For a minute, there was a brief spike of reports on Down Detector but that's gone down again. As of this writing, reports sit around 700 reports after hitting a recent high of 1500.

Beyond that, nothing appears to have changed.

Keeping an eye on things

We're going to limit updates here to something actually happening. It's largely been the same for the last six hours.

Unfortunately, whatever is plaguing Bluesky is still in there and things don't appear to be changing.

Now the status page is down

While reports and comments on Down Detector have remained largely the same, I have been able to access a very sluggish version of Bluesky.

However, just now, I tried the official status page and it is totally down.

I expect reports will jump soon as it seems Bluesky is having even more issues.

Calling it...for now

I still can't access the status page, but reports on Down Detector have dipped under 400 for the first time all day.

Meanwhile, the platform seems to be moving much faster and I can see replies again.